Kissed by a, er, thorn

Cold calling and email pitching for sales is rarely pleasant. But PR suppliers seem to be particularly bad at it. PRs are not perfect beasts, but we do spend our lives selling over the phone to tough hacks, so surely sales approaches to us have to cut the mustard?

This morning's example is a PR intermediary whose sales guy seems to have spotted my email address, not bothered to check my name (Google might help) and confused me with a small furry mammal or the Kissed By a Rose crooner. Not me guv. Anyway, here's the evidence:

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Hi Seal,

My Name is Kashif and I work for AMIPLAN. We help the national media journalist to source their future news stories and used by number of PR agency to forward plan for their client. I have attached a brief information along with this email. Please have a read and if you think this will be something which will be helpful just let me know and I will contact you to arrange a quick phone call.

Best Regards

Kashif


Kashif Michael
Account Manager | Advance Media Information
The Registry, Royal Mint Court, London EC3N 4QN
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Power selling eh? Kashif, chin up, at least you don't work for Cision.

Cision incision

Question: name a press relations database company that settles out of court with an aggrieved PR agency about a breach of contract matter, then calls the agency a few days later to try to sell it more services? And then sends a joke bull whip a week or so later in a further weak and severely misguided bid to sell its wares?

Answer: Cision.

The Cision vision is apparently "a consistent promise in every market". Can't speak for that, but you've consistently p&ssd me off with everything you've ever done.

Here's the sorry tale:
- December 2007, Rainier PR serves breach of contract notice on Cision over failure to provide a database that works properly. Cision fails to acknowledge this through various ranks of command and simply buries its head in the sand
- March 2008, Cision chases invoice payment and threatens court action
- April 2008, Cision finally joins the dots and realised why the invoices are being binned. Still threatens court action
- May 2008, letter from lawyer saying you're daft as a brush, Cision backs down with no apology
- June 2008, Cision starts laying on the sales charm thick and we can't stop giggling

Mad as sticks. The chaps at Gorkana and PR Newswire enjoyed the saga mind.